| Understanding and Preventing Supplemental Pages |
Understanding and Preventing Supplemental PagesFiguring out supplemental pagesIn order to find out what is causing pages to go into supplemental, I have used Alive Directory as an example. The reason why I used Alive Directory is that it is a highly regarded directory and it is supposed to be an authority site among the directories as well as having good editorial integrity check for their listings. I have searched on Alive Directory for supplementals and we will try to use these pages to see what is the cause. It is also common knowledge that usually there are very few backlinks to the directory's detail pages, so there will be less external factors to contaminate this "research". Okay, so I searched for supplemental pages indexed and found that there are 1,160 out of 4,680 pages. Around one quarter of the site went into supplemental. Well, much better than mine, around 80% of my directory went into supplemental. Sad, vey sad. The first supplemental I find is http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-4351.html. So what is the reason why this went into supplemental? Well this is pretty simple. There are probably 2 reasons - lack of content and it's meta description is the same as the rest of the pages. The site description consists of 14 words and nothing more. And it has a PageRank of 0 which simply means very few backlinks to this page. From the link number, we know that this page has been around for more than a few months already. And from copyscape, this page seemed to be a duplicate though I must say this copyscape thing isn't that accurate and this is tagged as a duplicate very likely because it has very little content. Next we see that a lot of the RSS Feeds have also gone supplemental. Duplicate content in this case? Very likely. The next non RSS Feed supplemental is yet another page (http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-3355.html) without much content and the same meta description as the other pages. And this PageRank is also 0. Yes, this page too has very few backlinks. And is tagged by Copyscape as a duplicate. The next supplemental (http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-1155.html) faces the same problem, except that it has a PageRank of 2. However, from the looks of it, this page is much older than the first two. I have another interesting page that has gone supplemental - http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-5639.html. If you were to go to the page, you will find that it has something different from the rest - internal backlinks. Browse down to the "Other Listings By This Author" and if you follow those links, you will see that they will all link back. But before you get excited, check out the date which this site is submitted - 26th April 2007. Yes, this is a new listing. And the site it is linking to also has a PageRank of 0. However, it is not tagged as duplicate by Copyscape. So are all the rest of Mr Derick Philips listings. Hey what does this all mean? Let's continue on first before we make any conclusion. From all these supplemental pages we can see that all have little content and same meta descriptions. Now we will go take a look at those that are not in supplemental and perhaps figure out the truth about supplemental pages. Ok, let's try this page: http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-455.html. Pretty obvious why this page isn't even if it doesn't have much in terms of content. Yes, the number of internal backlinks and the PageRank is 4. Although I doubt the PageRank itself isn't that important, it shows the power of the backlink, even internal ones. Another good example of little content but with backlinks and yet not in supplemental is http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-1127.html. It is also interesting to note that the site it is listing to have a PageRank of 4. Does this actually help? Perhaps what the page is linking to will be taken into consideration? I am not too sure about this though. Next, let's try this: http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-5226.html. Why is this not in supplemental? It is a young and doesn't have any Public PageRank yet which probably means very little backlinks (internal and external). Perhaps it's text description is helping it stay out of supplemental? It has around 50 words, much more than those I found in supplemental. It is good to note that Copyscape tagged this page as a duplicate. But the site it is linking to have a PageRank of 3. We then have this little interesting page: http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-5643.html. It did not go into supplemental. This page has decent content (26 words), some good solid backlinks and nothing tagged as duplicate. And the site it is linking to has a PageRank of 4. Conclusion: This is not final nor is it comprehensive. Heck, it isn't even one quarter comprehensive. A lot of experimenting and research have to go into this before we really can get a conclusive answer to this supplemental index question. But what we have here is some observations and some thoughts on how to go about preventing your pages to get into Google's beautiful butthole. 1. Content. Well, yes, if you have unique text content that is more or less of a decent amount or so, you should be fine as long as you have some backlinks to the page. But of course, if you page is a thousand words long and is unique, then you probably won't get into supplemental even if you have very little backlinks. But the thing is, even if your article or page is unique, it may not be unique in the eyes of Google because of the use of website templates. Probably why directories are being hit hard by this, too little unique content on one page compared to the rest of the page. I have seen pages with rich unique content but are still in supplemental, go figure. 2. Backlinks. The best way to prevent your site from going into supplemental. And if your site is in supplemental, you can easily dig them out by pointing some good quality links to it. I think even with duplicate content, this method works wonders. It seems that Google still place a lot of importance on links. And internal links can help too. You can see that from http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-455.html that internal links do help a poor content page and having good internal structure can prevent supplemental. Think "interlinking". In the case of http://www.alivedirectory.com/detail/link-5639.html being in supplemental, it could be due to the page being new (and the backlinks not counted yet) and probably will go out of supplemental after a while. Also important is the quality of the backlinks which helps build "trust". 3. Titles. You don't need duplicate content to get into supplemental. You can have the same title (and little unique content)and get tagged as a duplicate! Try to do some searches on Copyscape on directory listings, you can see that some of the supplemental have some unique content and with just the same title. I mean, sure if they have more text, I am sure it will not be in supplemental but Copyscape seems to think they are duplicates based on the title name. 4. Meta Description Tag. This is difficult to prove or disprove. But having unique meta description should at least help Google understand that the pages are different frm each other. But Meta Description probably has very little weightage in it. 5. RSS Feeds. Well, these feeds are definitely a source for getting supplemental pages. Who knows which will Google decide to place into supplemental - the actual page or the RSS Feeds. So I guess it is better to have the nofollow tag in your feeds or just use the robots.txt to prevent indexing of the feeds. 6. Outgoing links. Again something really hard to prove. But somehow it makes sense to me. What you are linking out to should be important. If you are linking out to good resources, then it should have some weightage on whether a page is "trusted" or not. 7. Duplicate URLs. Another danger, especialy now with the use of scripts which may generate different URLs for the same page. You may be getting a lot of supplementals due to this. There should be other factors involved like the overall TrustRank, age and whatever. These are beyond the scope of this article. Other articles: Internal Links - How to make full use of them Effective Directory Submission Increasing your Page Rank In Detail OnPage SEO For Web Directory Owners Link Exchanges Techniques Additional Benefits of a High Page Rank (PR) Secondary Article Writing - Link Baiting Sneaky Bastard's Way of Getting Backlinks Tiny Preview and Screenshots for PhpLinkDirectory V3.2.0 Outgoing links - Telling Search Engines what your page is all about A Complete list of Directory Scripts Some tips for the paid directory owner How often does Google cache your Site? A Project. Raising PR - Problems with paid directories and what to do. Our exclusive interview with Paul le Roux of WebWobot Search Engine Good Planning = Good SEO = Results! Article Writing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Forget keywords meta-tag and think keyword density! |